Over at iLT, John (can I call you John, John?) has posted the fourth in his renamed “A Brief History of Type” series. This edition concentrates on Didones, a form close to my heart, and as one has come to expect from iLT, it’s a smashing read.
Quark, bless them. Their eponymous DTP package will reach version 8 this summer, and has such forward-thinking features as drag and drop, the ability to resize images interactively using a mouse, and advanced typographic features such as hanging characters and punctuation. I know what you’re thinking. Wow, how come their management and engineering team haven’t been taken into a muddy field late at night, bound, gagged, stripped naked and shot repeatedly in the back of the head, for being lazy incompetent complacent little shits. Oh yeah, Macworld UK has a first-look review. Well, I say review, sounds a bit like a press release, especially with all those little helpful quotations from Dan Logan, Quark XPress Product Manager. Hmmmm.
Fancy being in the same room as Matthew Carter, John Downer, John Hudson, Akira Kobayashi, Jan Middendorp and Erik Spiekermann? And others besides? Who wouldn’t. TypeCon2008, being held in Buffalo, New York, is now open for registration. Registration costs $235 to $320, depending on how close to the event in mid-July you register. Just, you know, try to ignore that logo.
FontShop’s newsletter this month looks at the new fonts from OurType. Here is a challenge for you. Check out the samples in the newsletter and see if you can find one that doesn’t make you go ooohh, aahhh and mmmm in splendidly giddy delight.
Aegir has posted some funky close-ups from the newest addition to his library, Fraktur mon Amour.
First day back after Bank Holiday Monday, and what better way to start the day than a cool Mac freebie. So neat it hurts.
Well, maybe one update. Adobe Labs have Flash 10 in beta, ready for your downloading amusement. Yes, there are whizz-bang-crash-sparkly-crap additions, and significant new cleverness such as colour management, GPU compositing and blitting, along with improved anti-aliasing. But here is the nice stuff: Text layout components and a new text engine that allows for proper client-side font integration (instead of embedding), right-to-left support, inline styles and images, columns, support for ligatures, support for tables, improved support for scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Thai, and a crystal goblet to remind you all not to go apeshit.
Well, it is late so I will keep it brief. No updates till the weekend as I am attending the St Bride conference. I promise to do a proper write up, but here is a taster at the end of the opening day here in London: George Hardie was charming, witty and inspiring, Susanna Edwards was intruiging and pleasingly geeky (in the good way), and Lizzie Ridout was frankly fluffy. Karel Martens and Robin Kinross were interesting, if a bit uncomfortable. Jake Tilson was fun, Antonije Baturan was, umm, in need of more audio visual backup, and I wanted to hit William Hall with a baseball bat. Hard. And Erik Spiekermann was, as one would expect, the perfect end to the day. Day one over, and with day two to come, I feel warm and positive. Now how often does that happen, dear reader?
Brand tags, Fraktur mon Amour, ampersands, cryptograms, diacritics, Indic scripts, and far more besides. Yes, it’s the smashingly fantastic, sometimes bearded fellow Brit, John Boardley’s Sunday Type.
So, it appears our brand specialist has been drinking one too many Châteauneuf-du-Pape and has gone into a drunken overdrive during a meeting with DoCoMo… oh, sorry, I meant docomo:
“The new logo’s color is red, which symbolizes the company’s energy and dynamism.”
Oh really now! Surely it envokes a time gone by, of British empire, of red pillar boxes, colonial power. No no, it symbolises nature, red in tooth and claw, of fire, danger, heat. Of stop signs, traffic lights, or standby mode. Or of 40th wedding anniversaries, ruby in colour, sanctified by the cardinals of the Catholic Church, on Mars. Of passion, socialism, radicalism aggression. Of sex, and strawberries. Yes, red, so full of energy, so dynamic. You picked it cos its a nice colour. Grow up.
“The logo, along with other branding elements, embodies DoCoMo’s commitment to achieve customer satisfaction by understanding the needs of customers and building stronger relationships with them…”
How? How does it do that? How can setting some characters in lowercase with a moderately interesting typeface embody your commitment to achieve customer satisfaction? How can it possibly, in any way at all demonstrate an understanding of your customer’s needs, or in their relationships with you? Because the only way I can see that that could possibly be the case is if people were moving to other networks because their logo was red. Or in a interesting typeface. And I’m not convinced that is the case. Heaven forfend you have a conversation with your customers, ask them what they want, and what they don’t, in an genuine, open, frank conversation with them, ideally with the marketing droids locked in an Austrian cellar with Motorola Startacs shoved up their arses and ball-gags the size of meteors strapped across their smarmy mouths.
“...and to maximize the creativity of the company’s workforce…”
Actually, introducing working practices, rewards schemes, systems that show in tangible ways to staff that you appreciate them and respect them, and other such evil leftie ideas that enfranchise workers would do that more effectively than a logo. Try a better pension plan. Or an additional day off work a year. Or maybe a payrise. Encourage creativity by flattening hierarchies, cross-team working, anything. No, I am being silly. A logo, that’ll do it. Maybe some branded polo shirts?
“...and remain a leading innovator in the mobile communications industry.”
Right, so let’s forget that network upgrade. Or working with HCI specialists to get that usability thing down pat. I don’t need a permanent high speed connection to the net, ubiquitous wire-free computing, new ways of using, accessing and acting upon information. I just need to see a red logo on my phone.
“The logo and new brand slogan - Unlimited Potential, in Your Hand - also express DoCoMo’s commitment to offer high-quality, value-added mobile services and technologies that enhance human relationships and lifestyles.”
I quite often have unlimited potential in my hand, but I usually make sure I have some tissues handy.
So, to recap, you make your customers feel patronised, your employees look stupid, your designers look foolish and yourselves look totally out of touch with reality when you send out press releases like this.
“The new logo’s color is red, which symbolizes the company’s energy and dynamism.”
Oh really now! Surely it envokes a time gone by, of British empire, of red pillar boxes, colonial power. No no, it symbolises nature, red in tooth and claw, of fire, danger, heat. Of stop signs, traffic lights, or standby mode. Or of 40th wedding anniversaries, ruby in colour, sanctified by the cardinals of the Catholic Church, on Mars. Of passion, socialism, radicalism aggression. Of sex, and strawberries. Yes, red, so full of energy, so dynamic. You picked it cos its a nice colour. Grow up.
“The logo, along with other branding elements, embodies DoCoMo’s commitment to achieve customer satisfaction by understanding the needs of customers and building stronger relationships with them…”
How? How does it do that? How can setting some characters in lowercase with a moderately interesting typeface embody your commitment to achieve customer satisfaction? How can it possibly, in any way at all demonstrate an understanding of your customer’s needs, or in their relationships with you? Because the only way I can see that that could possibly be the case is if people were moving to other networks because their logo was red. Or in a interesting typeface. And I’m not convinced that is the case. Heaven forfend you have a conversation with your customers, ask them what they want, and what they don’t, in an genuine, open, frank conversation with them, ideally with the marketing droids locked in an Austrian cellar with Motorola Startacs shoved up their arses and ball-gags the size of meteors strapped across their smarmy mouths.
“...and to maximize the creativity of the company’s workforce…”
Actually, introducing working practices, rewards schemes, systems that show in tangible ways to staff that you appreciate them and respect them, and other such evil leftie ideas that enfranchise workers would do that more effectively than a logo. Try a better pension plan. Or an additional day off work a year. Or maybe a payrise. Encourage creativity by flattening hierarchies, cross-team working, anything. No, I am being silly. A logo, that’ll do it. Maybe some branded polo shirts?
“...and remain a leading innovator in the mobile communications industry.”
Right, so let’s forget that network upgrade. Or working with HCI specialists to get that usability thing down pat. I don’t need a permanent high speed connection to the net, ubiquitous wire-free computing, new ways of using, accessing and acting upon information. I just need to see a red logo on my phone.
“The logo and new brand slogan - Unlimited Potential, in Your Hand - also express DoCoMo’s commitment to offer high-quality, value-added mobile services and technologies that enhance human relationships and lifestyles.”
I quite often have unlimited potential in my hand, but I usually make sure I have some tissues handy.
So, to recap, you make your customers feel patronised, your employees look stupid, your designers look foolish and yourselves look totally out of touch with reality when you send out press releases like this.
Just a quickie. Andreas Pihlström’s Typisc has been renamed and rebranded to The Subtype Foundry. New website, go look.
I love French, it’s like English with ze sexy accent, non? Jean-François Porchez has republished the first part of a history of typographic forms from a French perspective (but thankfully in English), linked to from the PTF Newsletter for May (which, by the way, also includes details of Le Monde Courrier PTF in OpenType). Très bien!
Aegir has been at it again with his bezier curves, this time tracing his selection of note from that Flickr set you have may have already seen doing the rounds. It is a fine selection from a very mixed bag indeed. Go enjoy.
